so he stupidly called it a remarkable fireball, measured the ground carefully like a common engineer, and sent an account of the phenomenon to that far more prosaic periodical, the “Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society.” Another splendid apparition thrown away recklessly, forever! There is a curious form of electrical discharge, somewhat similar to the fireball but on a smaller scale, which may be regarded as the exact opposite of the thunderbolt, inasmuch as it is always quite harmless. This is St. Elmo’s fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around the masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low and tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature of the brush discharge from an electric machine. The Greeks and Romans looked upon this lambent display as a sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux, “fratres Helenæ, lucida sidera,” and held that its appearance was an omen of safety, as everybody who has read the “Lays of Ancient Rome” must surely remember. The modern name, St. Elmo’s fire, is itself a curiously twisted and perversely Christianized reminiscence of the great twin brethren; for St. Elmo it’s merely a corruption of Helena, made masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen’s brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the good old days of the upper empire; and when the new religion forbade them any longer to worship those vain heathen deities, they managed to hand over the flames at the masthead to an imaginary St. Elmo, whose protection stood them in just as good stead as that of the original alternate immortals.